Emily Stokes | The Guardianhttp://www.theguardian.com/profile/emily-stokes
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Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell – reviewhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/22/holding-upside-down-marianne-moore-linda-leavell
A biography of the great modernist poet Marianne Moore traces a life lived in her mother's shadow<p>&quot;Critics and Connoisseurs&quot; – a good introduction for novices to the modernist poetry of <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/marianne-moore" title="">Marianne Moore</a> – begins with typical wryness: &quot;There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious / fastidiousness.&quot; The images that follow – &quot;Certain Ming products, imperial floor coverings of coach-wheel yellow&quot; – are almost obsessively precise, yet the message of the poem is ambiguous. At one point, Moore seems to take a moral stance against the notion of &quot;ambition without understanding&quot;, but later goes on to describe, with evident pleasure, a swan that cannot resist investigating a piece of food being carried upstream. &quot;I&nbsp;have seen this swan and / I have seen you,&quot; Moore writes in a turn to the second person that never fails to take my breath away, although it remains unclear to me whether she is scolding or empathising with the reader.</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/ts-eliot" title="">TS Eliot</a>, one of Moore's greatest champions, claimed that the &quot;moderately intellectual&quot; would be hard-pressed to appreciate Moore's emotional depths – understandably annoying some critics, who insisted Moore's style was overly technical, her tone &quot;superior&quot; or &quot;finicking&quot;. In her insightful new biography of Moore, Linda Leavell analyses &quot;Critics and Connoisseurs&quot; and other poems, and argues that their themes are convoluted with good reason. Despite being one of the most remarkable minds of her generation, Moore spent her adult life living in a series of small apartments with her mother, Mary Warner, a politically liberal but pious woman, who resisted giving her daughter the personal freedom she both craved and&nbsp;feared. Born in 1887 and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (Moore never met her father, who was admitted into a mental institute shortly after her birth), Moore might have moved to New York or even London after attending <a href="http://www.brynmawr.edu/" title="">Bryn Mawr College</a>, but she ultimately felt it necessary to return home to Mary, who was depressed after a break-up with her female partner, and suffered from various ailments (although she lived to be 85). While few of Moore's letters express anything but protectiveness toward Mary (who in turn monitored Moore's eating, warned her against &quot;overexertion&quot;, and paid most of her earnings into an out-of-reach savings account), it is easy to agree with Leavell that Moore's bouts of depression and illness were likely the results of her claustrophobia.</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/22/holding-upside-down-marianne-moore-linda-leavell">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureBiographySat, 22 Feb 2014 08:00:07 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/22/holding-upside-down-marianne-moore-linda-leavellEsther Bubley/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesFrom inscrutable to cuddly: Marianne Moore. Photograph: Esther Bubley/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesEsther Bubley/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesFrom inscrutable to cuddly: Marianne Moore. Photograph: Esther Bubley/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesEmily Stokes2014-02-22T08:00:07ZAntigonick by Anne Carson - reviewhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/antigonick-anne-carson-review
Anne Carson's take on Antigone is impressively powerful<p>&quot;How is a Greek chorus like a lawyer?&quot; ask the chorus in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/author/anne-carson" title="">Anne Carson</a>'s latest work, a translation of Sophocles' <em>Antigone</em>. &quot;They're both in the business of searching for a precedent … so as to be able to say / this terrible thing we're witnessing now is / not unique you know it happened before / or something much like it.&quot; Such light-handed scholarship is characteristic of Carson, a poet interested in those moments when precedents can't be found and normal translations fail: &quot;Now I could dig up those case histories, tell you about Danaos and Lykourgus and the songs of Phineas,&quot; they continue: &quot;it wouldn't help you / it didn't help me / it's Friday afternoon / there goes Antigone to be buried alive.&quot;</p><p>Carson, a poet influenced by authors as diverse as Sappho, Euripides, Emily Bront&euml;, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, is known both for innovative translations of ancient texts and for her restrained but searing confessional poetry (try &quot;<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178364" title="">The Glass Essay</a>&quot; or <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/poetry/9780224061308/the-beauty-of-the-husband" title="">The Beauty of the Husband</a>). Some of her best works merge her two roles: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/03/andrew-motion-anne-carson-nox" title=""><em>Nox</em></a>, a facsimile of Carson's own scrapbook, presented the reader with notes for a translation of a Catullus' elegy for his brother, poem 101, alongside photographs and notes detailing the history of her own brother, Michael, who died after a long disappearance. Being scholarly and methodical, <em>Nox</em> suggests, has its limits: &quot;Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light,&quot; she writes. &quot;Human beings have no main switch.&quot;</p> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/antigonick-anne-carson-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureSophoclesFri, 08 Jun 2012 21:55:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/08/antigonick-anne-carson-reviewEmily Stokes2012-06-08T21:55:02Z